DELRAY PLANNERS SEEKING MEANS TO CLEAN UP CITY

The city is becoming lax in its appearance, says Barbara Smith, president of the Chamber of Commerce, who has initiated a loosely knit organization of community groups to discuss how to unify efforts to beautify the city.

The group had its first meeting Friday and will meet again 2 p.m. Oct. 4.

Representatives of 11 city groups were invited, although all did not attend. Those who did agreed to meet on a monthly basis to coordinate beautification efforts.

The city's problems have included trash pickup, code enforcement and discrepancies in appearance between city property and county pockets. Many groups want to take action but don't know what other groups are trying to do, Smith said.

"A lot of people say it's the city's responsibility, and that's true -- a good part of it is," Smith said. "A lot of it has to do with caring for Delray, with residents taking pride in their property.

"We need to look good because of economy. There are people who want to move here and will take a hard look at what we look like. Lately, to be frank, we're not keeping up with our appearance as we should be. And a lot of groups feel there's a problem in not knowing what each other is doing."

Kevin Egan of the Atlantic Avenue Association cited a case where two groups were discussing beautifying the business district, but were in a dispute over what kind of flowers to plant.

"Some groups start things among themselves and get nothing done," he said.

Discrepancies in county and city property upkeep also were discussed Friday.

City Manager James Pennington said there are pockets of county property in Delray Beach, ranging from small lots to large tracts of land. The city is attempting to work out a legal agreement to deputize city employees for county code enforcement.

Carol Neal, administrative assistant to Palm Beach County Commissioner Dorothy Wilken, said she was trying to obtain a map identifying the pockets and would investigate how the county and city might work together on code enforcement problems.

The problems primarily center on overgrown grass and weeds in county lots, Pennington said.

Code enforcement and how it affects the city's beautification efforts also was discussed. Several of those in attendance complained of homes being rented to farm workers at $200 a room, or up to $1,000 a home, far more than the market rent for the home.

But Pennington said such practices were not limited to any one community. And it is hard to establish whether a group of people living in a home are related, he said.

"This doesn't just happen in the black neighborhoods or the Haitian areas. Ladies and gentlemen, this happens all over the city," he said. "We've pinpointed four cases where we can get into prosecution, but I'm not going to identify where they are."

"We're going to find ourselves becoming a slum city," Joan Weir, a member of the city's historical society, said.

"We ourselves are the guilty parties when we let the grass become weeds," Pennington said. "Right next to the city building, I watched the grass grow and wondered how long it would be before we took care of it."

Yet the problem is not one of funding or manpower, he said. In many cases, the problem is getting Environmental Protection Agency-approved herbicides to kill weeds.

The City Council is considering several programs of beautification, Pennington said. Under one program, teen-agers would be hired to do maintenance work. Under another, the city would participate in a court- mandated program in which offenders convicted of minor crimes do community service work.

Among the groups represented Friday were: the city beautification committee, the Atlantic Avenue Task Force, the Community Redevelopment Agency, the Downtown Development Authority, the Atlantic Avenue Association, the Beautification Trust and the Beach Committee.